Sermon Tone Analysis

2 Kings 17:6-41 “Mixed, and Mixed Up”

I’d like to start off with a question.

In one sentence, how would you describe our God to other people?

Fill in the blank Q1.

I was curious to know what Americans feared most, so I looked up a top ten list of fears of Americans: 1)Fear of spiders, 2)social phobia (what people think of you), 3)flying, 4)speaking, 5)claustrophobia, 6)heights, 7)vomiting, 8)cancer, 9)thunderstorms,10) death or dead things.

I wanted to compare this to a Top ten list of fears for Christians, but I couldn’t find one so I need your help: What are your top three fears?

Q2.

2 Kings 17 (p19): This is a difficult passage to read and digest.

The Israelites were practicing syncretism – mixing their beliefs about God with the beliefs of the other nations around them, meshing them together.

But God was saying that there is no room for other beliefs, no room for other gods with His people, (no mixing) and He was dealing with them as such.

Mixing causes problems.

There is a principle in God’s law that pertains to this.

Lev 19:19 says You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind.

You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor shall you wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material – wool & linen.

NT echos this – don’t be unequally yoked.

Anyone know what you get when you mix hot water with cold water?

Lukewarm water – exactly what God doesn’t want!

NO MIXING!

We live in a world that has tremendous influence on us, and a world that has varied beliefs about God, if we are not careful, we can fall into the same trap that the Israelites did.

Does this look like the God you worship?

Barney pic.

You may laugh and say “no, of course not”, but before we say no let’s go back to the two questions I just asked you.

What sentence did you use to describe God?

How many wrote love?

How many wrote fear?

How many wrote holy?

Holy gets a pass.

OK – Now what are your top 3 fears?

Did anyone write God on their list of fears?

If you wrote holy in 1st Q, did you include God in your list of fears in 2nd?

Strangely absent from both the world’s list of fears and our list of fears is God.

You know what else is missing from both lists?

Barney.

You see, no one’s afraid of Barney, but then again maybe no one’s afraid of God either.

No one wrote God is to be feared as an answer to Q1, nor did anyone write God as something they feared in Q2?

Is it not Jesus who says in Mt 10:28 And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.

Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

Is that something we’re willing to tell someone else about our God?

That’s what Jesus told the crowd that was with him on that day.

When it comes to scriptures like these, the ones about fearing God and hell, I have a feeling that sometimes, in the back of our minds we think we’re a little more merciful than God.

Somewhere in the depths of our hearts we think we’re a bit more compassionate than Him – He wouldn’t really do that.

We don’t want to tell people what the bible says about fearing God or hell, because then, they may not like Him.

So like a good public relations firm we try to protect God’s image by avoiding these scriptures.

Some of us work around hell altogether, and we try to evade the harshness of hell’s reality.

In our own minds, we try to air condition hell a little, hoping that it’s probably not as bad as it’s described in scripture.

However, Jesus talked more about hell than heaven.

Sproul observes that the bulk of what we know about hell comes from the lips of Jesus himself.

Shouldn’t we at least mention it?

Maybe the world has influenced our beliefs about God so much that God, and Barney, have more in common than they do in difference?

I say God is strangely absent from our top ten list because there is an enormous amount of scripture (over 300 verses) that tell us to fear God, and we’ll get to some of them.

Church, are we letting the bible and what it says about God determine our beliefs, or are we mixing what the world believes God to be with what the bible says God is, and coming up with a lukewarm hybrid?

Is our view becoming a mixture of the world’s view AND the bible’s view?

V25 tells us Israel did not fear the Lord.

Do you think that God really wants us to fear Him?

Should God be loved or feared?

Is it love or fear?

Take a second and fill in the blank for Q3.

This is what we call a false dichotomy.

It’s not love OR fear, but BOTH love AND fear.

The biblical answer in God’s case is both.

We have scripture that tells us to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and, we have scripture that tells us to fear God and keep His commandments, and these scriptures do not contradict each other.

In the last question, how many of you wrote God is to be loved, feared, both?

If you know God is to be both loved and feared, did you include that in your description of God Q1?

Here’s my last question for you: Would you tell, or have you ever told anyone that God is to be feared?

Y or N

Unfortunately in the American church today, I see an imbalance in our approach to God.

In certain cases we see an overemphasis on the love of God and no mention of His justice or wrath.

In other cases, we have the opposite extreme where God is all wrath, no love, and eager to punish you.

He’s either Barney or a malevolent dictator.

The truth lies between these two extremes, and includes both love and wrath, both justice and mercy.

God cannot suspend His attributes and deny or contradict who He is.

He cannot suspend His holiness in order to be love.

Neither can He suspend His love in order to be holy.

He is BOTH, ALL of the time and therefore, He is to be both feared and loved.

God does not tell us to fear Him to scare us, but to protect us.

It is important that we let scripture define our God and not mix our beliefs with that of the world, because if we don’t get it right, if we don’t understand who He is, how will the world ever know who He is?

If we portray a God of love only and not to be feared, at best we are not revealing who God is, and at worst, we are deceiving them.

Has the world’s view of God seeped into the church and infected our thoughts of Him to the extent that our view of God is absent of any fear?

What does it mean to fear Him?

How can we better understand it?

It’s Not easy to explain.

How can we both love Him and fear Him?

It poses a problem to us as humans?

What is it?

First, let’s understand that God will not tell us to do something that is bad, wrong, or evil.

So if He tells us to fear Him, it must be good for us.

Here’s the paradox – fear is good, but it is still fear!

We must stop listening to the influence of the world, and even some Christians, that tell us that fear is wrong, and that God is ONLY love.

In describing God, our words will fail us because our language is limited and struggles to fully codify who he truly is – we say God is awesome and He is, but I also use awesome to describe an ipad, a vacation, or a football game.

Now we know God is certainly greater and more awesome than all those things yet we use the same word.

We also use the word Holy to describe God.

Holy = other.

Holy accurately explains who he is, but in our humanity we drag the word Holy down to describe cows and some other things.

No picture I give you or words I say will satisfactorily describe who God is – He is beyond our words.

In fact He says in Isaiah “to whom or to what will you compare me?” Any example I give you will fail on some level to explain who He is.

Heb 12:29 says that our God is a consuming fire.

I think this will be the best example I can work with.

God is a consuming fire.

On a cold day we love the warmth of the fire and it keeps us alive-life, when I’m hungry I use fire to cook food- provision, when I’m in the dark and can’t see, I can use fire to light my way, and when I’m under attack I can use fire to protect myself, however we warn our children “do not play with fire – you can get burned”, fire can do untold destruction.

We are to respect fire and its power, and not play with it – the same is true of God.